Quotes About Experience

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.

Time is the school in which we learn.  

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.

Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.

Time is the school in which we learn.

We tell each other stories in order to live.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

I had never before understood what "despair" meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.

It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.